"I'm not interested in AMD as I am upgrading my system, and would have to change memory, case & PSU to go to an AMD system."All u need to change is mobo and CPU (possibly psu depending on power) for amd.

Certified is right, the motherboard and cpu would be all you needed(assuming you have sdram currently. Also the motherboard and cpu would together be CHEAPER than just buying a p3 solution. Regardless, crashman is the one who can help with your pentium needs, he can suggest many courses of action if you are adamant against the amd solution.

"The Cash Left In My Pocket,The BEST Benchmark" No Overclock+stock hsf=GOOD!

The case only has the PSU fan, which is rated @ 250watt - the AMD site says my PSU will only power a 750Mhz Duron.

Therefore, I have to have Intel, for the reasons 1. Cooling insufficient for AMD, and 2. PSU insufficient.

I'm sure the 1.2@1.5 would keep me going for another 2 years - I've managed so far on the PIII-450! It's just I'd like to hear from people with an overclocked Celeron 1.2, and what motherboard is the best for this CPU.

Yes, I have an SE440BX motherboard, but where would I get hold of the Powerleap adapter in the UK?

My only doubt with this adapter is whether my mobo would *definitely* accept it - I had to flash my BIOS to upgrade from my original PII-350, and the Intel site says that the BIOS won't allow anything higher than my current CPU.

This subject has been beaten to death many times in the last months, so I'll keep this short and leave you to use the "Search Boards" function.

The PowerLeaps have a 30 day warranty agaist not working in your system.

A Tualatin Celeron is pretty much the same as a Coppermine PIII clock for clock (ie: a Celeron-1200 will run about as fast as a coppermine PIII-1200 theoretically would). The Celeron memory bus is slower, but the Tualatin cores feature data pre-fetch which helps make up for that.

Your 60gxp has sustained transfer rates between 33-37MB/sec(depending on whos benchmarks you believe) regardless both are bottlenecked by your ata33 connection. A new mobo(pentium of athlon) is probably in order.

"The Cash Left In My Pocket,The BEST Benchmark" No Overclock+stock hsf=GOOD!

OK, first, your motherboard does not support bus speeds higher than 100MHz unless you want to use an overclocking utility in Windows.Standard PIII options end at 850MHz for you. There are special (rare and expensive) higher speed PIII's at 900MHz and 1000E MHz. The regular 1000EB would run at only 750.

The Coppermine Celeron tops out at 1.1GHz and would require an ordinary slotket adapter. The Tualatin 1.2GHz Celeron will work on the iP3/T adapter and give you about the performance of a PIII 933 (the 933 has the advantage of 133MHz FSB, but your motherboard doesn't).

Shanewhite: Get a Promise/HighPoint/Adaptec (or whatever) ATA-100 PCI controller card if you're concerned about HDD throughput. I run a Highpoint 370 RAID controller on my BX board (Asus P2B-D) and it just flies along. I can't remember what I paid for mine but it was around CDN$50 which should be ~£25 in your neck of the woods.

Crashman: (re: "The Tualatin 1.2GHz Celeron will [...] give you about the performance of a PIII 933") I'm typing this using a Celeron-1200 (on an MSI 815ET Pro-R) and, in day to day stuff, it easily outperforms the PIII-866 next to it. Both have Win2000pro SP2, 256mb, similar (5400rpm) Maxtor HDDs, integrated i815 graphics, and neither is overclocked. As we don't have any intensive games in the office I can't comment on those, but I'll compare SETI times once it's run a bunch of workunits.

Crash has built a bajillion p3 systems, and I think he would know what he was talking about.

Not that your lying or anything, I just think crash is more credible.

Having said that, crash mentioned his performance in the cpu/overclocking forum, and there is a nice thread as to why there is performance degridation.(something to do with intel hamstringing the new cellys internally last I recall.)

"The Cash Left In My Pocket,The BEST Benchmark" No Overclock+stock hsf=GOOD!

Yes, the Celeron 1.2GHz is a perfectly adequate processor, and will match a Radeon 8500 quite nicely. My performance evaluation WAS for games, I don't bother testing office apps as these are already so fast on even a basic computer that any speed difference there is unnoticable.

>The Celeron memory bus is slower, but the Tualatin cores >feature data pre-fetch which helps make up for that

I've read some posts on Aces forum on the subject; it appeares data prefetch is actually disabled on the Tualatin Celerons, though its not clear whether this is done articificially in the BIOS (and thus hackable) or really disabled on the die. I dont have the link, but it was a recent post in the general forum.

As for the performance of these Celerons.. A friend of mine bought one of these super-cheap computers recently, with a 1.2 Celeron, 256 Mb RAM, but its unbelievably slow. I suspect the chipset to be the culprit (ALI ALadin with integrated TNT2). With a TNT based integrated video, you wouldnt expect this machine to be any good for games of course, and well, it isnt, but even basic office stuff is remarkably slow under windows XP. Multitasking really blows. probably due to a super slow harddisk as well (yes, DMA enabled).. I swear my old P3-500 was a faster computer.

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =

I recently upgraded my P3-500 (BX440) to a Celeron 1.2 with the adapter from powerleap and i must say it was a pretty good upgrade for the price. Still using my old TNT2 Ultra and doing fine in most games. In 3dMark2000 the result was increased with about 45% (maxing out the graphics card tho).

May I refer you to this review at <A HREF="http://www.xbitlabs.com/cpu/celeron-1200/" target="_new">x-bit labs</A> about the celly-t 1.2GHz. They had an unlocked celly-t that they ran at 7.5x133 & compared it to a PIII 1000EB.

The only thing I would be concerned about reusing the board is the bios update. You mentioned that you were using a Intel SE440BX board. I know the first revisions, if you updated to bios -10 or -11 (last 2 digits of bios revision), the board will not post if it detects a CPU speed higher than 450MHZ.